How Not To Disappear by Clare Furniss

A gorgeous, heart-breaking story about family, being let down, making decisions and identity that manages to be tragic and poignant but also funny and life affirming at the same time. It’s a coming of age story and also about THE CIIIIIIIIRCLE OF LIIIIIIFE and paying particular attention to the relationship between the beginning of and end of life. I loved the way the auth
or handled the subject of aging and dementia- sensitive and empathetic, but without any kind of sugar coating.

17 year old Hattie is pregnant- she knows it, we know it very quickly too. Her flaky, charming, debonair friend Reuben doesn’t know it though, and he’s the father. He’s currently drinking and seducing his way through Europe. In an attempt to avoid having to have the “baby or abortion” conversation with herself, Hattie instead finds distraction in a long lost great aunt named Gloria.

Contacted via a neighbour, Hattie learns not only that Gloria exists, but that she is also not in good health. Upon their initial meeting, scathing, cold Gloria seems drunk and cruel- and not that keen on Hattie. Hattie is trying to dig up details about the dead father that she barely remembers, but Gloria is being deliberately difficult. She seems to be struggling with the early stages of dementia and lashes out, resulting in Hattie revealing that she’s pregnant. Pregnant and miserable. After she storms out, Gloria becomes keen to make amends- suddenly Hattie Is more interesting, and Gloria suggests a trip for the two of them. A bucket list trip where Gloria gets to revisit places that have impacted on her life. She considers to herself that as the only keeper of her secrets, the truth about her family and her past is quickly receding from her memory- and once she forgets, the secrets, and technically Gloria will cease to exist.

I loved the dual narrative- Gloria takes us back to her adolescence, her spirited teen years and her first love with Sam. She reveals her story bit by bit, claiming forgetfulness when it gets too painful and doesn’t want to go on. Gloria’s memories are full of fascinating social history and cruel glimpses into the prejudices and attitudes of the post war era. Her home life sounds awful, but her love for her sister Gwen, Hattie’s Gran is obvious- we puzzle why they lost touch and why Gloria didn’t attend the funeral. Hattie becomes a historical detective, determined to uncover Gloria’s history. It’s a gripping, devastating mystery that seems so cruel and unfair. I loved that the growing trust and (sometimes begrudging) affection between Gloria and Hattie is the crux of the story- not romance, or revolution. It's a private, slowly burgeoning relationship built on the balance of experience and age, and youthful enthusiasm. 

I loved Gloria. I loved how stubborn she was, how arch and sarcastic. Partially to protect herself from her increasingly vulnerable neurological state, partially because she’s not going to stop being a sassy devil any time soon. She’s old school glamourous, suffers no fools and needs only herself and a gin sling to be happy. As the story goes on, her strength and bravery becomes more apparent, and the reader’s heart breaks for how much she has been through, resolutely refusing to let it crush her. The secondary women in this novel are all brilliant too- they have their own temperaments, flaws, life goals, agency. Edie is brave and wonderful… Alice, Hattie’s little sister is basically a micro Gloria, and Hattie’s best friend Kat and her Mum too; we just don’t see enough of them. I want more interesting, flawed, opinionated women just *being* together. It’s something I don’t think happens enough in literature.

How Not To Disappear manages to touch on so many issues, but manages to avoid being preachy. It feels very real, very true, and imbued with that sort of barely-believable, tragic ‘scandal’ that blights the past of most families. The problems encountered by these characters feel real, the characters feel real. We feel invested in the consequences. The importance of the decision making process is really highlighted- it is suggested that a person can never feel real regret if they made the decision that was right at the time. The book deals too  with decisions that are taken away or made for someone.

In conclusion, How Not To Disappear is a wonderful dual narrative story about estranged relatives getting to know each other. It’s about how society and social attitudes change, but they don’t change enough. It’s about doing the right thing for yourself, admitting responsibility and letting yourself be open to people, to heartache and to pain. It’s about me memory and emotional trauma and how unfair life can be. There are wonderful characters, funny dialogue and one of the most badass old ladies in YA fiction.

Mister Memory, by Marcus Sedgwick

An odd, fascinating detective mystery with all the twisty, turny brain wringing that the reader would expect of the Masterful Marcus Sedgwick. Known mostly as a Young Adult author, Sedgwick brings his unpredictable plots and spiraling scope to adult fiction for the second time.

As a youth, Marcel Després drifted to Paris from the wine producing villages of the south. At the urging of his artist neighbours, Marcel turns the one skill he has (but didn't realise was out of the ordinary), perfect recall, into a cabaret act; Mister Memory is created. Night after night he stands on stage, remembering everything, each bottle and hat removed, each digit on a blackboard- a neat trick. Except there is no trick; Marcel has an infallible memory that stretches back completely and entirely, with all its network of supporting memories and tangential avenues, to before his actual birth.

Marcel is also widely believed to be both a murderer and insane. What initially seems like an impassioned killing of an adulterous wife by an enraged husband is not as straightforward as it might seem. Incarcerated in an asylum, without any kind of investigation, Marcel Després admits to the murder, remembers it in vivid detail. complete and absolute detail, right down to the mouse droppings on the landing. The asylum's physician, Doctor Morel sees Marcel as the case of a lifetime- a book waiting to be written. Morel also discovers that in addition to his astounding memory, the patient is incapable of lying.

Meanwhile, hearing of the hushed up, too swift resolution of this broad daylight murder case and infuriated by the idea of a wife-killer escaping the guillotine, young detective Petit's curiosity and desire for justice is powerfully aroused. Reprimanded for poking around and frustrated by his superiors' lack of interest in justice, he sets about conducting a thorough, though off the record investigation of the murder of Ondine Després, alongside the somewhat unlikely partner of Dr Morel. With his assistance, Petit begins unraveling the night of the murder, depending on Marcel's perfect memory to recall every tiny detail. But how can a man who remembers every detail of every moment of his entire life sort the evidence from the everyday? The more Petit digs into Marcel's memory, the more untoward the investigation becomes: police corruption, sexual depravity, switched identities, deception and a scandal big enough to galvinise the political landscape of France; a secret that powerful men are proving themselves willing to murder for.

I loved how brilliantly MS crafted the seedy, decadent cesspit of Paris in the dying months of the 19th century; the cafes, the cabarets, the filles publiques, the booming business of photographic pornography and the promise of the dawn of a new era. This book felt a step above most historical fiction- fin de siècle Paris is a common setting, but rarely does it feel as alive and as grubby as Marcel's Paris. The detail about the contemporary police force and their chains of command and Judicial system were particularly thorough and lent an authority to Petit's below-board investigation. There are moments of shocking discovery and genuine tension as Petit's guesswork and predictions solidify into trials of hard evidence. I particularly enjoyed the scene in Paris' Archives of Hell with the librarian, guardians of the national shame. I loved that Petit was surprised and a bit disappointed that the library of confiscated "Indecent material" just looked like a regular library, with files and boxes and shelves. There are a lot of light, comedic little touches that season an otherwise quite intense read.

Though there are a lot of characters, each one is colourful and plays their part in the expansive web of connections that makes up Marcel's extraordinary case. The watery eyed doctor Morel who for the first time in years finds himself caring about a patient, wanting to cure him rather than idly minding them for their own safety. The misanthropic Boissenot,  senior police detective, who is convinced that Paris's crime rate, highest ever, indicates nothing other than the end of the world. The waddling Cavard, an old fashioned secret communist, good guy and ultimate hero- the guy who brings the police to account from within initially seems to be a grumpy pencil pusher, but evolves into quite the justice warrior.

I struggled in parts with the pacing, it very much comes in fits and starts and there is the occasional dry spell where not much happens, either with Petit's investigation or with Morel's probing of Marcel's mind. That might be my fault though, as I read in uncharacteristically short bursts over an unusually lengthy period of time... For the vast majority of the novel, Mister Memory is a whip smart, very satisfying historical crime detective story with a unique premise, an array of interesting and nuanced characters, and a deft hand guiding a twisting narrative that might seem, under a lesser writer, to be extravagantly far fetched. To discover the twist, the murderer, the motive and the fall guy by the halfway point and still keep the reader hooked is quite an achievement.

There Will Be Lies, by Nick Lake

There Will Be Lies, is Lake's third appearance on the Carnegie list since I've been following it, but I have to confess that TWBL is the first one I've read. The book starts of ordinary enough- modern day Arizona. A dry, dusty, infinitely flat place that has been Shelby Cooper's world since she moved from Alaska as a baby. Homeschooled by her mother and obsessively shielded from the outside world, Shelby is intelligent, naïve but with an appealingly defiant, snarky attitude. The book's other location, "The Dreaming" shows up later on- a mythical space that exists beyond time and before our World and is inhabited by figures from Native American folklore, some of which can pass into the real world.

When the over protected, apparently super-vulnerable Shelby is knocked down by a car when standing outside the library, a coyote appears with the message that "There will be two lies. And then there will be the truth". This cryptic, bizarrely delivered message starts off a chain of events that ultimately highlights how fragile our sense of identity is. Shelby discovers that everything her world is built upon is nothing more than a flimsy web of lies and deception and that her whole reality is threatened by the newly revealed truth. Though I don't want to give too much away, I do want to mention that the final section of the book, post truth, I found to be the most thought provoking and certainly the most emotional. How do you deal with a discovery like that? It's a really unexplored perspective of an unusual crime. 

The theme of identity runs thickly throughout the book. Do we change as we get older? Are we always the same person? What makes us the person that we are? What does a person take into account when building their identity? *Do we* build our own identity or is it built for us? What's left when somebody takes those things away? Do we ever really know ourselves or the people around us?

I really liked Shelby as a character, she was sarcastic, clever and kind of lippy which makes her a really believable, authentic feeling teen girl. I liked her little asides to the reader (the one about her mom's Pyjama jeans especially made me laugh). When Shelby discovers she can enter The Dreaming, she is given a mission by Coyote (Capitalised, as in the archetypal trickster or lore, and AKA Mark, hot library guy). Shelby must rescue the Child and kill the Crone, or the world will end. It seems fairly high stakes and there isn't much contextual information available. It transpires to be a quest with more personal consequences to Shelby than it initially appears.

In the possibly real, possibly metaphorical world of The Dreaming, the Crone has kidnapped and imprisoned the Child to give her more power. Archetypally evil character that she is, this is preventing the rain from falling, parching the land of The Dreaming and starving its majestic wildlife. It's a fairly by-the-numbers quest, complete with animal helpers, flimsy frayed rope bridge and slavering wolves, but it takes on a new significance as Shelby starts to unravel the lies in her own world. I liked that it's never really made clear how concrete the Dreaming is, but the mirroring of the Draming's problems and Shelby's real-life crisis is skilfully managed and it adds a new dimension to the plot. Whilst I found the real-world Thelma and Louise scenario to be much more gripping to read, I can see what this fantastical fantasy world added to Shelby's story, and it provided her with the perspective and the tools to do what she needed to do in the real world. 

It's hard to talk about this book without giving too much away. It's a twisty, intelligent and original thriller that throws some surprising twists at the reader- there are a lot of OMG moments that the reader needs to feel for themselves in order to even attempt to grasp the extent to which Shelby must be reeling. The story is at first glance quite far-fetched, but it's constructed in a way that makes the whole thing quite believable and ultimately tragic. 

I really enjoyed this novel, though oddly I'm not in any hurry to backtrack and read his other titles. There was something about the frantic, mysterious concept of this novel that appealed to me in a way that the others didn't. It really is a very clever book that asks questions about identity, family and love. Shelby's mother, a character I've not really talked about because she's the one that all of the titular lies are orchestrated by, is a really interesting character- she's a good example of how duplicitous and contradictory a person can be, You can never really know. If you enjoyed this, I'd recommend Magonia by Maria Dahvana Headley, another book that features a dual reality, a protagonist with a quest and a disability (that only applies in one of the Worlds too, snap) and a really likeable, believable teen girl at its centre,

I do think it will make the Shortlist but I'm not sure about taking home the title- we'll have to see who else makes the final 9.